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Thursday, April 03, 2014

Laugh or Cry?

Via Instapundit, an article titled "What Can Educators do to End White Supremacy in the Classroom?" was published on April 1st. It's a perfect parody of what some people on the right (ummm, like me), when they get way too carried away by their paranoid delusions, might imagine people on the left thinking and saying.  I assumed it was an April Fools Hoax and found it hysterically funny (I can laugh at myself with the best of them), but in the extensive comment section below the article, people were taking the article seriously.

Some people will take a really good hoax seriously, but it got me wondering, so I emailed the author and asked him about it.  His response:
The article is not an April Fools Day joke. We attended multiple sessions at the conference and reported on a few of them.
Here are some excerpts from the article:
One attendee, a teacher and the diversity director at his school, spoke about the activities he is implementing and said it is important for teachers and administrators to discuss social justice with their students. Radersma echoed his sentiment.
"If you don't want to work for equity, get the fuck out of education," Radersma said. "If you are not serious about being an agent of change that helps stifle the oppressive systems, go find another job. Because you are a political figure."
That explains a lot about the state of our educational system.
Radersma also argued the first step is realizing that all white people are carrying the signs of oppression.
"Being a white person who does anti-racist work is like being an alcoholic. I will never be recovered by my alcoholism, to use the metaphor," Radersma said. "I have to everyday wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply imbedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose everyday to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way."
We're all raceaholics.  Who knew?
Radersma said she taught a lower-level English class at the high school and her students were exclusively people of color. However, she said the Advanced Placement course in her school was almost all white and Asian students. Her principal observed class one day and commented on the difference in students between the two courses. 
That experience, and the fact that her boss did not know how to tackle the problem, led her to leave the classroom and work toward her Ph. D. Radersma told the group she realized the problem was the institutionalized racist structure of education and her white privilege was causing the racial achievement gap.
Yup. Institutionalized racism.  That's the only possible explanation.  But apparently not against Asians.
"Who's at fault? My white body is at fault," she said.
Her white body may well be at fault for some of the ills in our educational system, but I don't think "white" is the operative word and probably not "body" either.
"I can't teach students of color nearly as well as a person of color can."
Is that because 2+2 doesn't equal 4 for a person of color?
The conference was paid for in part with taxpayer dollars.
Yup.  Because there's nothing more worthwhile than something like this conference to spend the money on.

So are you laughing or crying?

15 comments:

Bret said...

First, apologies to erp, who I've sometimes considered a little extreme in her perception of the left. She has never come close to describing the left as anywhere this extreme and suddenly her views seem a lot more moderate.

Second, apologies to aog, who usually is the one who publishes excerpts from the MAL (Modern American Left), but there hasn't been much activity at Thought Mesh lately, so I decided to write about it.

I'm still laughing by the way. The humor of human foibles trumps all else in my mind.

erp said...

Extreme? I don't report half the stuff I know for a fact is happening.

Bret said...

Oh, and apologies to Peter for linking to an article pointing out that the Canadian Brock University offers a Ph.D. in "Critical Whiteness Studies." What better place to study that subject than the great white north? :-)

Clovis said...

Well, talk about irony - ultimately, Radersma is in the same side as Erp on ending welfare:

"It's that savior mentality, like 'save them, because they are not like us,' and that normalization of whiteness. Whiteness is best and those poor others aren't as good as us," she said. "So, we need to think of them and give them our sympathy and our charity and our generosity, which is so demeaning to the people on the receiving end. It's so demoralizing and disempowering to be receiving it."

Yes, Erp knew it all. :-)

Bret said...

Clovis,

The article doesn't say, but I suspect she's not at all opposed to welfare. She's only opposed to individuals, and in particular white individuals, being charitable. I'd bet she's more than happy to have the government provide welfare because that's not as demeaning as receiving from a white person.

So no, I don't think erp and Ms Radersma would agree on that.

erp said...

Clovis, that's the very reason we donate anonymously. We choose where our hard-earned money goes and it doesn't go to promote any pet causes or inflate anyone's ego or gain power over others.

BTW - what makes you think I care about the color of anyone's skin or their ethnicity or think only people who are identical to their students in these areas can teach them.

You continue to make gross assumptions and I don't think it's a language problem. You are determined that I am what I am not and apparently no amount of evidence to the contrary will cause you to apologize.

I'm still waiting for you to apologize for calling me a liar and positing that I would be chanting, "let them die" with the other tea partiers, even though I am not a member of any organization, nor did the tea partiers do any such chanting.

Clovis said...

Erp,

Hey, how did you end up losing all sense of humour? I was joking. Take the hint of the smile face.

It ruins it to explain, but: you and Radersma are so opposite that I had my laugh at that one quote that could be used to make you both in the same side.

---
I'm still waiting for you to apologize for calling me a liar and positing that I would be chanting, "let them die" with the other tea partiers, even though I am not a member of any organization, nor did the tea partiers do any such chanting.
---
You are not one to let it go, are you?

It is useless, but let me try:

i) I did not call you a liar. At some point I accused you of having a selective memory over racial discrimation back at your youth, and even that was more of a little mockery than anything else. But if you are offended in any way for that one, please forvige me - I apologize for it now.

ii) The "let them die" thing is being misrepresented by you. The point is not if you would chant it or not, the point is that you too would prefer to see that hypothetical 30 year old guy with no insurance to have his consequences, no matter what. You, and Skipper too at that, may make a fuss over the little details, but the heart of the matter is not about who chanted what. Never was. So at that point I was right, yourself explicitly confirmed so in the comments section of Skipper's post on this.

Bret said...

Oops, that was me that didn't see the smiley face.

Clovis said...

Oh, by the way, let me explicitly declare I may be a progressive, but I absolutely disagree with Radersma on the charity thing.

Please, by all means, you guys can donate everything you wish to me. I presently have the need of a new car, to get my own house, and maybe some good burger and pizza too. Not that I can't buy burger and pizza, but I just can't have enough of them.

Oh, and I have a tending to brown skin (if getting sun enough), so you guys can feel great giving me all this stuff.

Hey Skipper, tired of driving that BMW? ;-)

Peter said...

Bret:

It appears that it's not a doctorate, it's a Masters in Critical Sociology. You can focus on critical whiteness, critical gender studies, critical animal studies, critical environmental studies....etc. Seems there is no shortage of things to criticize. Were I younger, I would be tempted to enroll to study black oppression of female animals.

I think this is all mainstream stuff in today's sociology faculties, which may explain their employment stats. It also strikes me as very 20th century. In the 60's we had Cleaver and Newton scaring the wits out of us by saying much the same, now we have aging Boomer white women keeping the flame alive while waiting for their pensions to vest. If you want cutting edged stuff, I know a sociology prof at our local university whose background in deep ecology and animal rights has led him to the point where he now preaches (using very impressive scientific, philosophical and logical tools) that the entire human race is a blight and that life is such a bummer that non-existence is objectively superior to existence. Now, that's what I call critical. Ergo, the only defensible political programme is to promote human extinction through abortion, birth control, suicide, euthanasia, etc. He insists his students are very receptive to his message, although I've seen no evidence of a spike in local suicide rates. I suspect a lot of his grads are simply too busy painting the baby's room in their starter homes.

erp said...

No way Clovis, I never said let him or anyone die. Point of fact is that everyone did get medical attention even those who routinely and continually abuse themselves with food, drink or drugs. Even Harry, who would never "misrepresent" the truth admitted to that much.

I don't know what your national health plan is all about, the one of the table here now is an INSURANCE policy, not a MEDICAL plan and even though the folks falling for the scam have that precious insurance, they aren't guaranteed any doctor or hospital will see them. A friend of ours is retiring because he got orders from the government in the form of a form letter saying that he should go right ahead and treat the people who come to him for orthopedic surgery because he will eventually get paid and BTW here's a sheaf of paperwork you need computerize and submit on everyone you see who's enrolled in our plan, so not only is it doubtful he will ever get paid and if he does, it'll be a small fraction is his actual costs (in congress right now is bill to reduce further Medicare payments to doctors), but it'll cost him a fortune to expand his record keeping, not for medical reasons, but to add the nazi-like data base the government is compiling on us all.

In fact, as I said before and Harry called me a liar that time too even though I provided a link to an article stating that fact in our local newspaper, the ER has instituted pre-screening of patients, NOT TRIAGE. So the fallacy that everyone who comes to the ER will be seen can be maintained. The trick is that not everyone will get to pass "GO" and actually get into the ER.

People who used to be seen at the ER even if they don't have any money are now being shunted off to local Quik Clinics (I have no idea if they'll be seen there or not) or told to apply for Medicaid (a health scam for the indigent devised by previous dogooder administrations which is useless except to throw billions of tax payer dollars into a black hole of union thuggery and more bureaucracy.

... and please use your vaunted ability for researching comments to see what you actually said. Your memory is seriously faulty. As always, links please.

Clovis said...

Erp,

---
Your memory is seriously faulty.
---
Basically, you just called me liar - or, that's what you understood I did when giving you a line like this.

Anyway, I offered apologies, but as expected, it can't be enough. Should I send flowers too?


---
[...] the ER has instituted pre-screening of patients, NOT TRIAGE.
---

Erp, I know you were used to thing as they were, but they were not what ER are supposed to do.

An ER should only attend people who are at conditions that need immediate attention. "Emergency room", remember?

Your system used to attend just about everyone who had no insurance through the ER as a bypass for the lack of public healthcare. But that was far from optimal: it is way worse to treat people only when they are so bad they need the ER, and if they are not bad enough, it is a waste of ER resources to still treat them - they *should* go to a non-emergencial clinic with a proper appointment. What's so hard about it that you don't get?

erp said...

You don't get that Medicaid has been in place for decades. It never worked and this scam won't work either. People went to the ER because it became the neighborhood clinic as well as an urgent care center. Costs were paid by the paying patients at the hospital. It's one of the reasons hospital costs are so high.

Stop making assumptions about things about which you know nothing. In fact, many other Quik Clinic types of places popped up all over which also actually made appointments, etc. and were very much cheaper than private physicians. Free enterprise at work.

What you don't get is that while the present system as it evolved from what did (Peter I really don't go back to the 18th and 19th C.) work is that people were never dying in the streets from starvation or lack of medical attention, nor did any statistically measurable number of people live in tar paper shacks or were whipped by white sheriffs, except in Harry nostalgic memory.

My two cents worth on Appalachia. It's an affectionate nod to Harry's childhood memories.

Clovis said...

Erp,

I am not making assumptions about things about which I know nothing - I am only telling you what an ER is supposed to be in a hospital setting.

That it became a "neighborhood clinic" was not good from an admnistrative, costs and medical point of view.

I know it does not count much for you, but in the rest of the world, ERs are only emergency places.

erp said...

You're right I don't care what the rest of the world thinks or does, nor do I approve of what the ER has become, I am only reporting that it is a fact that it has served as such for a long time.

Medicaid wasn't supposed to be a failure either, but it is, so the needy and those who pay the higher costs for medical care to pay for their care have devised a system that has been working.

Whenever the government is involved in anything there is zero chance that it will work and an even less than zero chance that it will be "affordable."